Does thhe Martinverse has something similar to the Star Wars Essential Atlas.

Something examining the Lore of the world.

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There's at least one book coming out soon, and another later. There's The Lands of Ice and Fire, which will be a world atlas (released at the end of the month) and World of Ice and Fire, which is supposed to be a companion of sorts, although there is no solid release date for this, nor would I guess there is likely to be until GRRM gets close to finishing the series.

World of Ice and Fire, which is supposed to be a companion of sorts, although there is no solid release date for this, nor would I guess there is likely to be until GRRM gets close to finishing the series.

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There isn't a solid release date yet, but there'll be one sooner than that. The world book has always been planned to come out between Dance and Winds, and Martin is working heavily on his portions of it right now. I would imagine his hope now is to deliver it soonish for publication next year. Then again, his hope last year was to deliver it last year for publication this year, so...

From what I've gathered, 'The World of Ice and Fire' was expanded a bit following the show's success and given a bigger budget for art and other extra production values. Might explain a bit of a delay, in addition to George's slow writing pace of late.

The world book has been in development for a long time. It was first announced in 2006 for publication in late 2007/early 2008, back when Martin was deluding himself that he could finish Dance very rapidly after Feast. Then it kept getting pushed back along with Dance; by June 2011, when Martin had finished Dance and was turning his attention to various other projects, the world book was "almost three years late" and "need[ed] to be finished and delivered by year's end." That was, I would guess, the big reason why he reported around that time that he wouldn't even be starting The Winds of Winter until early 2012; he was hoping to finish the world book instead. Obviously that didn't happen; as recently as mid-September of this year he was still working on it, reporting (oh, the surprise) that the new material was taking, and becoming, longer than he had expected.

Looking now at the subforum of Westeros.org where the world book is being discussed (including by the co-authors and forum owners), I see that the text of the world book had been finalized by the end of last year and they were just waiting on artwork... but then while the artwork was being completed Martin decided to add more material, including the stuff he's been working on recently. The map book, a fairly recent development, ended up taking the publication slot originally planned for the world book, which is now on track for release sometime late next year.

Good interview, but some of the translation errors were a bit distracting. Martin strikes me as a very precise speaker, in a similar manner of how he writes his books. When there is a slight deviation by the writer/interviewee away from English, or being written by a person who doesn't have a complete command of the English language it seems to really interrupt the flow of the content and deteriorated even more towards the end. Other than that, looking at what I perceive to be the content of the interview, I thought it was well done and not full of a bunch of cliched questions.

If the letter's going to be at all important later on, I'm sure they'll work it in. I don't tend to think it will be-- whatever Jon does after A Dance with Dragons, it probably isn't going to be taking up the banner of the King in the North, and if all that happens is him refusing the possibility, that's not important enough from the TV writers' perspective to be worth dramatizing.

I imagine the order of King's Landing vs. Riverlands events in the book is likely to be jumbled a bit. If the show stuck very faithfully to the sequence of events in the book, they'd have to do Joffrey's wedding in the first or second episode of season four, and then the rest of A Storm of Swords would only take up half the season. That might be the plan, but I doubt it. We already know, for example, that Oberyn Martell isn't being introduced this season, even though in the book he arrives in King's Landing before the Red Wedding.